To-day, as we drove on, I looked back on the summer. As a rule, our months at the shore are compact of slow and tranquil days, but this season had fled past like a demented moving-picture film. Buster had arrived at 9 A. M. the 8th of June. By noon he had made his presence felt. During the next five days he took the gas-range apart, to see how it worked, and put it together again, but inaccurately, so that it blew up and all but annihilated a perfectly good cook. I had to raise Louisiana’s wages three dollars a week. He drained all the water out of the fountain pool, to see how long it would take to refill it; then, at sight of a wayfaring organ-grinder he rushed away, to bribe the man to open up his instrument and let him see how its harmonious innards worked. Thus, he left nine fat, venerable goldfish to flop themselves to a miserable end. To be sure, he sniffled audibly at dinner that night and almost declined dessert; which didn’t bring back aunt’s beloved Chinese carp, alas! He tried to teach Gulliver, the Leonards’ Great Dane, to do German police-dog stunts. Gulliver, who is young, obedient, and muddle-headed, took his training seriously to heart and made breath-taking leaps at the Leonards’ gardener’s throat, to the up-blown pride of both Buster and the gardener. Unhappily, he saw fit to show off his new accomplishment on an irascible New York banker, to whom Commodore Leonard was trying his best to sell his early Pullman place at Beverly Farms. As Buster hotly declared, if the banker hadn’t squealed and acted such a sissy, Gulliver would have stopped with a mere snap at his lapel. But his cries so excited the poor pup that by the time the horrified commodore came to his aid most of the banker’s raiment was in tatters, to say nothing of his dignity. Commodore Leonard lost his one chance of the year to unload that white elephant of a house. At that, he congratulated himself because the banker didn’t sue him for damages. Subdued and chastened, Buster took himself off to the harbor to seek diversion among the ancient mariners who had already found in him a stimulating audience. He spent, I judge, a pleasant afternoon. He rode back on the Magnolia ’bus just at dinner-time. He did not return alone. Proudly he strode up the steps, one eye cocked over his shoulder at the bland and tarry skipper who swaggered, all too jovially, behind. Eagerly he ran to the palsied Aunt Charlotte. “Aunt Charlotte, this is my friend, Captain Harrigan, of the _Lottie Foster_. The captain has come to dinner and to spend the evening, and he’s promised to tell us all his adventures and draw the plans for my racing yacht, when I get one, and teach me how to make her torpedo-proof and—and everything! Cap Harrigan, meet Aunt Charlotte!”